ALGIERS, 12 April 2004 — President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, flush from a stunning re-election victory, now has his hands free to concentrate on completing his drive to end Algeria’s civil war, analysts say.
More than a decade of bloodshed perpetrated by extremists shifted to low gear in the past year, and Bouteflika now intends to allow former leaders of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) to form a new party, on the condition that they renounce violence as well their stated goal of setting up an Islamic state.
The FIS has been banned since March 1992 when it was on the verge of winning parliamentary elections in the north African country.
The army’s intervention in January of that year, when the second round of the legislative vote was canceled, sparked the brutal civil war in which some 150,000 people, mainly civilians, have lost their lives.
In his landslide re-election victory last Thursday, Bouteflika apparently won a major portion of the FIS electorate, estimated at some 3.5 million out of a total of 18 million eligible voters.
“Bouteflika owes his victory especially to his opponents who allowed him to play the national reconciliation card, to the return of security and the end of bloodletting, allowing him to win the votes of Islamists and those who suffered from the violence,” said an editorial in the conservative daily Al-Chourouk.
Even though the founding leaders of the FIS, including number two Abassi Madani, did not endorse any candidate, Bouteflika was backed by two prominent FIS figures, Rabah Kebir and Madani Mezrag.
Kebir lives in exile in Germany, while Mezrag is the former leader of the Islamic Salvation Army, the armed wing of the FIS which received a blanket amnesty in 2000.
“The head of state’s entourage made contact with FIS leaders to get them to accept his national reconciliation policy to pave the way for the formation of a ‘neo-FIS’,” historian Hmida Ayachi told AFP on Saturday.
Ayachi, who supports Bouteflika, said FIS leaders “realized that the international context has changed since the anti-American attacks of Sept. 11 and should not blanch at accepting this approach.”
Backing Bouteflika would most likely please the army, which has more or less crushed the extremist movement, Ayachi said.
Some 80 lives have been lost so far this year among civilians and security forces, and those of an equal number of rebels, according to a toll compiled from official sources and press reports.
More than 2,000 people were killed during 1999, the first year of Bouteflika’s first term, and again in 2000; the figure dropped to 1,900 in 2001 and 1,400 in 2002, while last year’s violence claimed 900 lives, nearly half of them rebels. Rebels still at large belong essentially to two groups that have rejected Bouteflika’s reconciliation program: the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) and the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), which has been linked to Al-Qaeda. But both groups have practically evaporated, security sources say.
